Adam Curtis’s six-part series.

Elisions

Part 4

2:35​

CURTIS: To many liberals in the west, the Communists had been heroes in their fight against America, which meant that the refugees did not deserve to be helped. To Kouchner, this was outrageous.

KOUCHNER: The point is people are dying in the China sea. I mean, the boat people are now facing piracy.

3:55​

CURTIS: Baez went on French television, and she gave an interview that caused a sensation.

FRENCH INTERVIEWER (subtitled): This is a new face of Joan Baez. Because for many years you were against the American war in Vietnam. Defending the government of North Vietnam [Baez wags her finger in disagreement], and today you are attacking it.

BAEZ: No, I never defended the government of Vietnam. I spoke for the people inside of Vietnam. I was against the violence that this country perpetrated inside Vietnam, but I was equally against an American boy being shot out of a plane as I was the women and children of Vietnam being bombed. So it was never possible for my position to be clear – particularly, [in] somewhere like France, where peace movement means left. I’m not left.

CURTIS: Baez was immediately attacked by other anti-war activists, led by Jane Fonda.

Part 5

57:10​

CURTIS: The Americans were pouring nearly a billion dollars in every day to keep a conflict going that nobody knew how to win.

1:01:15​

CURTIS: And out of that alliance came the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. ISIS was far more than just another version of al‑Qaeda in Iraq. Its public face were the Jihadists. But it was organised and guided by men from the Sunni tribes, many of whom had been experienced soldiers in Saddam Hussein’s army. As a result, they swept through Iraq and on into Syria.

1:01:39​

A group of men wearing camouflage are walking in a line; each draws a knife from the same box as he walks past it. Next, each man holds the shirt collar of a prisoner and pushes them into kneeling positions.

Part 6

1:13:07​

CURTIS: But one star had anticipated this. In 2012, the Coachella festival and Dr. Dre used computers and fragments of data from the past to reconstruct Tupac Shakur on stage. And an album that Tupac had recorded just before his death was also released. He had called it Killuminati.

1:13:26​

CURTIS: They were doing it, he said, to avoid confronting the very real powers that did control their lives. His message was simple – that suspicion was just another form of control

NEWS ANCHOR: Tonight, turmoil [as] the American housing market gets even worse and the aftershocks wipe tens of billions off world stock markets.

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